Selected Works

Poetry Collection

Poems of love, loss, and survival. "Like a daring archeologist, the poems of Hotel Worthy dig [deeply] into the intimate layers of years, excavating the fossils of memory, love, loss, and family history. These poems compel us to have the courage to emerge from our past shipwrecks and embark anew. This collection is a roadmap for beginning again."

"This charming, unpretentious novel delves into a different form of the pastoral, modeling itself on Thoreauvian attention to a person's place and moral actions in the spheres of nature, society, intellect..."

News and Reviews

When the Characters Find You

Thanks to Women Writers, Women's Books for letting me talk about the process of creation, persona poetry, and the long process from the Leopard Lady's first appearance to the finished book.

First Review

The first review is out for Leopard Lady: A Life in Verse, and it's the lead title in Grace Cavalieri's roundup for the Washington Independent Review of Books. "Traveling showfolk, river towns, Siamese twins, the rubber man — and there's a professor that tell stories reverberating through the Leopard Lady's contemplations and ruminations. Some parables are funny, some sad, all are profound in Lady's innocence and discoveries. The Leopard Lady is the product of a powerful writer who knows what she wants and sets the Lady out to find it. Nieman, with vivid language, writes what Leopard Lady believes — including Bible teachings, dramatized and characterized through a fictional mind that suddenly becomes wholly real to us. This is about the stages of life for one whose perseverance is to seek pieces of the puzzle and even a piece of love. The poems are images of truth with stunning versatility," writes Cavalieri, Maryland's poet laureate, who produces "The Poet and the Poem" at the Library of Congress for public radio.

The Creation of the Leopard Lady

What they're saying about To the Bones

"This is the West Virginia novel done right: slam-bang storytelling in tightly controlled language, by turns horrific and funny and beautiful."Pinckney Benedict, author of Miracle Boy and Other Stories

Where did she come from?

I wrote this blog post for LitChat on how the Leopard Lady entered my life. Every story comes from somewhere, but some are stranger than others.

Notes from a student

I enjoyed this blog post from Angela Leffel, who took my class at John C. Campbell Folk School in July.

Busy 2019

I was vacationing in Ireland, shaking the debris of the past year out of my head, when I searched out a wi-fi signal and checked my email. There it was - confirmation that a lengthy process toward the publication of my next novel had come to fruition.

I'm not announcing the publisher yet, letting them have the official announcement, but it's a book that is both a look back at my earliest writing, and a leap into a new form. Pub date is supposed to be spring of 2019.

Along with that good news, I can confirm that my latest poetry collection will also appear in 2019. "The Leopard Lady Speaks: A Novel in Verse," will be out in the fall from Press 53. Some of the poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Chautauqua, and other journals.

More to come!

"Backwater," my YA/crime crossover novel, won the Seven Hills Prize for YA fiction. That was a nice bit of confirmation as it continues to seek a home. Meanwhile," "The Leopard Lady Speaks: A Novel in Verse" has garnered a finalist status for the May Sarton Prize and semifinalist in the Crab Orchard Review series.

Other Tongues

The end of March brought two interesting encounters with literature in other tongues - one in Spanish, one in Greek.

On March 22, I was delighted to take part again in the Quixote Festival that Rafael Osuba has created across North Carolina. Last year, I read from Cervantes as well as from "Hotel Worthy" in Cameron Village Library, Raleigh. This year, it was a celebration of 50 years of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude." You can see an impromptu interview on the home page, and a bit of the readings (also from "Hotel Worthy") on my Facebook page as well.

It was great to be back on the campus of Queens University of Charlotte, where I gained my MFA, and to join a group of poets and writers to celebrate the work of the word in both English and Spanish. My Spanish, sadly, is limited - I could gather a few phrases or words, but it was like picking wildflowers out of dried hay, the color and scent were gone.

If my Spanish is limited, then my Greek is nonexistent - still, I will be excited to see translations of some of my poems done by students of Evangelia Liana Sakelliou at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. I had some correspondence with one of the students regarding "He Whom You Love," a pantoum about the fate of Lazarus. It features vernacular like "full of piss and vinegar" - wonder what the equivalent is in Greek? Should they appear in Poeticanet, as Dr. Sakkeliou indicated, I'll post a link - it is a bilingual journal.

I just finished an hour-long interview with David Allen Hurst - Creativity in Motion on BlogTalkRadio - here's a link to the podcast if you'd like to hear some of our wide-ranging discussion of writing, childhood memories, the names of trees, and the need for persistence.

A new review of Hotel Worthy by Fred Chappell, the dean of North Carolina letters.

A New Review at "Books for Readers"

Poetry, of course, has long been thriving in small presses. In Hotel Worthy by Valerie Nieman each poem is serious–not meaning without humor, because they are witty and often brilliant in their word experiments– but rather always reaching as far as they can go--serious as the opposite of superficial. A poem like "Stratigraphy," for example, starts with an archaeological site and brings us twenty-first century readers back to our ancient progenitors. Nieman makes this identification so smoothly that you feel suddenly that you are one of the ancient makers of the engraved figures.

Another good poem connecting us to ancient archeological sites is "The Guide: Cave Paintings at Fonte de Gaume," which takes another strategy and gives us the story of the guide's grandfather who, with his friends, marked the old cave paintings with graffiti.

We then, in Nieman's poems, are led to identify with the ancient artists, the scientists, and the careless adventuring boys– just for starters.

I have known Valerie Nieman's novels better than her poetry, so I'm not surprised she can tell a story–but I am awed that she can do it so compactly, with such brilliant attention to imagery and dreams and words. The title poem, "Hotel Worthy," written in full-justification chunks, is a splendid evocation of her own childhood (and much of mine!)– not the nostalgic parts, but the parts when you are trained and shaped in ways that your adult self may have to reject.

Balancing this psychological depth are other poems like the wonderful "Live With It" in which a woman takes a stand in favor of her own body:

It's not my hairy body that offends you, but my hairy mind,mammalian, full of heat.....

But to focus on the personal poems would be to miss the breadth of Nieman's collection: the archaeological poems are one part; there are also poems drunk on words like "Spandrel;" lots of nature and natural phenomenon for which she has precise language; poems about gardening and harvesting and other work. Even road kill gets a poem. The collection ranges widely, but its intelligence is always grounded in objects and bodies

.Almost at the end is a several part poem with apples called "A Blessing on the Tongue" that describes "the narrow hips of Red Delicious" and then ranges into history and the naming of apples like King Luscious, and the derivation of the word Luscious.

A good start to the year... in the photo above, you see me reading with Richard Krawiec at the East Bay Meeting House in Charleston. This series, Monday Night Poetry and Music, has been running for several years, and Jim Lundy keeps it humming.Also this early January, Hotel Worthy was featured by Sundress Publications in their ongoing series called "The Wardrobe" highlighting poetry by women. A link to one of the poems is located above, while three others were featured earlier in the week.

Thanksgiving is here, and thanks are given - which should not be reserved to one day a year.I was delighted to learn that work from Hotel Worthy has been nominated by Press 53 for two prizes.The title work - flash fiction/poem - was nominated for Best Small Fictions 2016, along with work by Hedy Habra, Kathleen McGookey, Joseph Mills and Grant Faulkner.Another poem from that collection, "Choice of Words," has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Thanks, Press 53, for believing in Hotel Worthy.This has been a good year - I enjoyed doing readings at Piccolo Spoleto and the Joaquin Miller Series and at Salem College's Center for Women Writers. I am thankful for these and other opportunities - for work that continues - and the great unfolding delight of each day.I was driving back from Raleigh the other night and a shooting star - a meteorite - flashed across the road in front of me. It was a brief but memorable encounter, as the speck of dust or ice flashed out in a sizzzle of light. Thanks for that, too.

I read the other day that Paul Simon wrote "Homeward Bound" while on a train trip in or around Manchester, England. That song was a favorite when I was a teenager, though I'd traveled no farther than Maine, and still calls up strong emotion when I hear it.So it's not surprising that when I connected with the folks at Kestrel literary journal to appear again this year at the Kestrel Festival in October, that music began playing in my thoughts. Kestrel was a special part of my years in West Virginia, where I began my work as a writer, gained my first publications, and then was "brought into the fold" as a literary magazine editor with the nascent Kestrel.Martin Lammon and the late John King and I would gather over coffee at the Poky Dot restaurant in Fairmont, WV, a classic "breakfast all day" diner that's been upscaled in recent years, to exchange our stacks of manuscripts and discuss what we liked, and what we weren't certain about. I'm proud that in those early years were published many writers who were already well known or who would go on to gain distinction nationally. Soon after the magazine began, we started thinking about a festival of literature, art, and music. That came to be, and we hosted such luminaries as Donald Hall and Jean Valentine and Margaret Gibson and many others. Mary Dillow Stewart would join the editorial team, then John Hoppenthaler. I left West Virginia in 1997, but Kestrel is still going strong, under the leadership of Donna Long and Suzanne Heagy and Elizabeth Savage. The festival, too, endures.If you are in or around Fairmont, WV, on Oct. 9-11, catch the events at the university and venues in town. I will be reading Saturday at 2 p.m. and doing manuscript consultations.

North Carolina is blessed with fine organizations that support writers, from the North Carolina Writers Network to the MFA programs at several universities, from excellent bookstores to retreat centers that offer a quiet space for reflection.The Center for Women Writers at Salem College is one of those special places, and I'm honored to be invited to read there on Oct. 9.Established in 1996, the center encourages writers at its host institution of Salem College, within the Winston-Salem community, and around the world through its international literary awards. Annette Allen's vision has been continued by Metta Sáma, Director of Creative Writing & Assistant Professor in Creative Writing, who runs the center with the aid of student interns.If you want to know more, contact the Center at cww@salem.edu.